Trish and Conrad then took two leather chairs facing one another. She took a deep breath, cleared her throat, and began to give the speech she had been rehearsing all morning. “I know you love your son,” she started carefully. “So, I’m asking you, please don’t do this to Nicky.”
“Exactly what is it you think I am doing to Nicky?” Conrad asked with a frown, all of this according to Trish’s vivid recollection of events.
“Well, the TWA takeover,” Trish answered. “It’s happening, isn’t it? I mean…” She faltered. Conrad sat with an impassive face and allowed Trish a moment to collect herself. She then concluded that in her view, the merger was a very bad idea. Nicky was agonizing over it, she said.
“But how does this concern you, Trish?” Conrad asked. His curious expression suggested that he really wanted to hear her answer. Nicky was her husband, Trish explained, and thus everything that concerned him concerned her. “And this is his whole life,” she said.
“Well, I’m not so sure about that, my dear,” he said. “But, be that as it may, if you don’t mind my saying so, I feel that you are very far out of your depth here.”
“Why?”
“Because you and I have never once discussed business,” he answered, “and I don’t think it’s appropriate to do so now.”
“But…”
“Please. I don’t wish to offend you,” he quickly added. He was simply being as candid with her as possible, he explained.
“But… I…”
“I love my son very much,” he continued. “And I promise you, I will take care of my son, just as I have always taken care of my sons. Now,” he announced as he stood up, “it’s been wonderful seeing you again, dear.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I’m sure you know your way out, don’t you?” he added, holding both of her hands “All my love to those little rascals of yours.” Conrad then regarded his daughter-in-law with a raised-eyebrow expression suggesting that as far as he was concerned, their time together had come to an end.
“No. Wait a second,” Trish said, summoning up all her moxie and trying to be firm. This meeting had not gone at all the way she’d hoped, and she wanted to get it back on track. “I am only thinking about your son,” she continued. She said that she loved Nicky, would do anything for him, and was very worried about him. Conrad seemed unfazed. Business was business in his mind, and it had nothing to do with anyone’s personal agenda, even a family member’s. “Are we finished now, dear?” he asked. “Or is there more you would like to say?” He stood looking at her for a few more seconds with a patient smile. “No,” she conceded. “I suppose I said what I came here to say.”
“Very well,” Conrad concluded. He grinned, nodded, and then walked away from her, leaving her alone in the expansive drawing room. A few moments later, Hugo Mentz joined her. “Would you like me to show you out?” he asked, his German-accented voice seeming more formal than ever. He led Trish through a labyrinth of rooms to the marble entryway and toward the large, imposing eight-foot oak doors. After Trish took two steps outside, she turned around to say goodbye to him. But before she could say a single word, the butler abruptly closed the doors behind her with a booming thud.
Nicky Considers Suing His Family
On May 9, 1967, TWA’s takeover of Hilton International was complete. With this change, it became official that Nicky Hilton had lost his position with the international subsidiary. TWA named him a board member, but with limited responsibilities. Meanwhile, Conrad would continue on as president of the Hilton Hotels Corporation and Barron as head of the domestic division—no changes there. As far as Barron was concerned, the sky was now the limit for the Hilton brand. Literally. In a speech before the American Astronautical Society in Dallas in May 1967, he discussed what he called “The Lunar Hilton”—an underground one-hundred-room hotel that would be built just below the moon’s crust. “In almost every respect it will be physically like an earth Hilton,” Barron explained, adding that construction would start as soon as the notion of mass space travel caught on, which, he admitted, “might be a while.” As far-fetched as it may have sounded, he was only half joking. “Look, my father had many ideas in the 1940s and 1950s that people thought were out of this world,” he explained. “And today those same ideas are commonplace. We Hiltons think big. That’s always been our way.”
While Barron’s ambitions were reaching dizzying heights, Nicky had never felt smaller or more insignificant. “We heard that Nicky was drawing up legal action alleging that Barron had caused Conrad to become disaffected with him,” said Conrad’s longtime lawyer Myron Harpole. “It would have been a case against Barron, and possibly Conrad—likely the entire firm. He was talking to high-powered lawyers, who were, of course, getting back to us on it, keeping us posted on his intentions. If he filed a lawsuit like the one he was promising, it would have been a complete disaster for the family and for the company. Barron and Conrad wanted to avoid it at all costs, but they had to acknowledge that Nicky was very upset. There was no telling what he would do.”
Nicky’s friends tried to talk him out of litigating against his own powerful family. They didn’t see how a lawsuit would help him and suspected that it would just make things much worse. “Your old man and your brother gave you every chance in the world,” Stewart Armstrong told Nicky one day during a particularly heated exchange. “Do you know how many hundreds of millions of dollars they handed over to you when they put you in charge of the international division? You’re the one who threw it all away,” he charged, all of this according to his memory of the conversation. “Be a man, Nicky. Take some responsibility for your actions.” Not surprisingly, Nicky didn’t see it that way. “I didn’t start with the pills and liquor until after they stole my company out from under from me,” he said in his defense. “Excuse me,” his old friend told him, “but I was there. Remember? That’s pure bullshit, Nicky, and you know it. You fight your family in court, I guarantee you will lose everything.”
“My call, then,” Nicky said. “I got nothing left to lose, anyway. I will burn their entire world to ashes,” he concluded bitterly. “Welcome to the dark side, my friend. Because that’s what we’re looking at now.”
“You have a family. A wife. Two sons,” Stewart reminded him. “Don’t think for one second that you are the only person with something to lose here.”
Undaunted, a few days later Nicky met with prominent show business attorney Arthur Crowley, who took the meeting at Nicky’s home and was astonished by Hilton’s debilitated condition. The last time he had seen him, many years earlier, Nicky was a handsome lothario who didn’t seem to have a care in the world. Now he looked like a battered old man. Bitter and unhappy, Nicky made it clear that he wouldn’t stop until he had justice. “I felt that he was hurt, feeling betrayed, and was lashing out,” Crowley would later say. “I told him that before he considered litigation, he needed to clean himself up, go to a rehab center, and try to put the pieces of his life back together. Then, if he got clean, we could consider our options. I wasn’t going to have him fight his family in the shape he was in. He would have been a terrible witness for himself.”
“Oh, screw that,” Nicky exclaimed, exasperated by the attorney’s sensible advice. He said he didn’t need “a shrink.” He needed a lawyer.
“Look,” Arthur Crowley said. “The world spins fast, kid. Life is short. So, straighten this shit out, Nick,” he said. “You’re a Hilton. You’re better than this. I’m not going to stand by and watch you destroy yourself and your family, too. I’m just not going to do it.”
“Well then, to hell with you, man,” Nicky said, now fed up. “Just get out, all right?”
Though Nicky received about $100,000 in stock as a result of the sale, it wasn’t much considering the amount generated by the international division, and it didn’t matter to him anyway. Over dinner one evening, he unburdened himself to his friend Noreen Nash, wife of his doctor, Lee Siegel. “How could they do this to me?” Nicky asked Noreen. They were sitti
ng at the bar in the Siegels’ home, nursing martinis. He looked tired, his face drained of all vivacity. Nicky put his head on Noreen’s shoulder, like a little boy might do with his mother. “I would never do this to them,” he said quietly, likely referring to Conrad and Barron. “I just never would, Noreen. You know me!”
“I don’t know what to say,” Noreen told him. She recalled being at a complete loss. “Maybe, like they said, it’s nothing personal,” she offered. “Maybe it really is just business.” She was grasping at words to try to help relieve his pain, but she knew the truth: It really was just business… and business being business had little to do with personal relationships, especially in a powerful family like the Hiltons. In her opinion, Nicky had let down his father and brother, and they were now making him pay the price. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder why Conrad and Barron didn’t just come out and tell Nicky that he had been his own undoing. But then, in thinking about it, she came to the conclusion that they probably felt Nicky wouldn’t have been able to handle the truth. He was already in such a downward spiral, how would he cope with the fact that he had done it to himself? “I felt that maybe, in their own way, they were protecting him,” she said. “And I still think there is some truth to that.”
From Kings to Paupers
While it was expected that TWA’s stock would rise as a result of the merger with Hilton International, that did not happen. After the takeover, it went into a nosedive, dropping from $87 a share at the time of the change to, a year and a half later, just $43 a share. “The major problem was OPEC,” hotel mogul Donald Trump would observe. Of course, Trump wasn’t involved in the situation—he was twenty-one at the time and still in college—but everyone who has ever studied the hotel business knows about this unsuccessful Hilton venture. “Oil prices started to skyrocket, and that proved to be devastating to the airlines. The stock would never recover,” Trump added. “I think it bottomed out at five dollars a share in 1974.”
Meanwhile, Pan American World Airways and the InterContinental Hotels chain continued to thrive, not really feeling much competition from the new TWA-Hilton alliance. Also, other airlines such as American and United continued to flourish because, said industry observers at the time, they had iron-willed CEOs dedicated to their brand as carriers and were not distracted by other ideas, such as getting into the hotel business.
Though foreign travel continued to boom in the late 1960s and would become even more lucrative in the 1970s, Conrad Hilton and the Hilton Hotels Corporation would not benefit from such growth. Because of the merger with TWA, Hilton lost all rights to his name overseas. In years to come, it became painfully clear that Nicky Hilton had been right all along. Even Barron would, many years later in 2010, admit, “Not every deal worked out well in the short term, such as our sale of Hilton International to TWA in 1967.”
Frank G. Wangeman, senior vice president of the Hilton Hotels Corporation at the time, recalls the merger as “our blunder of 1967. It proved a mistake,” he said. “TWA’s airline business soon ran into financial problems, while Hilton International—indeed, the entire international hotel industry—enjoyed tremendous growth. We simply had not realized what a prize we had in the international division.”
Myron Harpole put it this way: “This was a big misfire on both Mr. Hiltons’ parts—Conrad and Barron—and we all knew it. They knew it.”
In strategizing the merger with TWA, Conrad and Barron suspected there might be certain problems with a number of the foreign hotels, and they were correct. The hotels overseas had long been run by Hilton International using a lease agreement. The Hilton firm didn’t actually own the hotels; it just managed them. Now, of course, the management would be taken over by TWA. It wasn’t a surprise that the boards of directors of some of the hotels became resistant to the change. After all, Conrad Hilton had a system in place for managing hotels, one that had worked for years. Though TWA promised to adhere to those same standards and practices, some of the hotel’s officers felt that the merger was a violation of their contract with Hilton International. The result was a messy tangle of lawsuits, many of which would end up in Nicky Hilton’s lap since he was now on the TWA board of directors and, as such, still responsible for some of the Hilton International business. “He wasn’t happy about it,” recalled Frank G. Wangeman, years later. “Whereas he was once in charge of the whole shebang, now it seemed that his job was to put out fires we had caused by the merger.”
“Look at all of this bullshit,” Nicky said to Stewart Armstrong when Armstrong came to visit him one day in his office. The top buttons of Nicky’s collar were undone, his tie was loosened, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up, as if he had been toiling at work for many long hours. An ashtray on his desk was overflowing with cigarette butts. He pointed to a large stack of paperwork. “All of this because of the takeover.”
“What’s the problem?” Stewart asked.
“What isn’t a problem?” Nicky asked, agitated. “I told them this was a bad idea. But of course no one listens to me…”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is that this is a family business and Conrad Hilton is the head of this family, so no one cares what I think,” Nicky answered. “And now… this.”
Nicky explained that he was currently acting as a mediator between TWA-Hilton International and Tokyo Electric Express Railway, LTD, which went by the name Tokyu. Tokyu had just announced that it was pulling out of its twenty-year contract with Hilton International to run the Tokyo Hilton because it did not agree with the TWA merger. “We wanted to go into business with Conrad Hilton and that’s what we did,” said one spokesman. “We have no interest in being in business with TWA.” Moreover, Tokyu was a stockholder in Japan Airlines, which was TWA’s competition in Japan. Nicky told Stewart that Tokyu had given plenty of notice that they were going to end their contract with Hilton International if the merger was finalized. Therefore it didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone when they did just that. There was nothing left to do now, Nicky explained, but for Hilton to sue Tokyu for breach of contract.
From his haggard appearance, it was obvious that Nicky hadn’t been sleeping. Though Stewart didn’t ask, his gut told him that Nicky was probably on Seconal. “You look like shit, Nick,” he told him.
“Man, we had it made,” Nicky said, ignoring his friend’s critical observation. “We were kings overseas,” he said, his voice filled with discouragement. “We had power. We had money. We had it all. Now we’re just… paupers.”
Stewart Armstrong suggested that Nicky didn’t need the income, due to the stock he had made on the merger, “so what’s a rich boy like you even doing here? Stop trying to sell this goddamn dream, Nick. Let it go.”
Nicky stared off into the distance. “I was about fifteen,” he said, suddenly lost in a memory. “And my dad had this chauffeur who doubled as a butler, his name was Wilson,” he remembered. “He knew everything about cars, that guy.” Nicky then recalled the time that he and Barron convinced Wilson to teach them how to disassemble one of Conrad’s favorite automobiles, a 1931 cabriolet. With a chuckle, Nicky remembered that the three completely dismantled the engine. However, the Hilton boys lost interest in the project before Wilson could teach them how to put it back together. A week later, Conrad came back from a business trip to find the engine parts of his prized cabriolet scattered about in one of the garages. At dinner that night, he looked sternly across the table at his young sons and said, “I hope you boys learned a little something about cars while I was gone, because I want you to put that cabriolet back together.”
“So me and Barron and Wilson worked like the devil on that thing for about a week,” Nicky recalled with a smile. “Somehow, we managed to do it! We were so proud, we couldn’t wait to tell Pop.”
Conrad walked into the garage with a big smile on his face, Nicky remembered. He got into the vehicle and put the key in the ignition. Within seconds, white smoke began to seep from the motor and green liquid began pouri
ng out of it. He quickly turned off the ignition, got out of the car, cleared the smoke away from his face, and, coughing, said, “Nice try, boys. That’s all I ask. That you at least try to get the job done.”
The two men had a laugh. “My pop needs me,” Nicky said, now back to the business at hand, “and Barron needs me. I think maybe this is another chance…” His voice trailed off.
“Another chance to do what?” his friend asked him.
“I don’t know,” Nicky said halfheartedly. “To try to get the job done, I guess.”
Trish Tries Again with Conrad
It was November 4, 1967. From just outside the front door, she could hear the phone ringing inside the house as she tried to fit the key into the lock. She hurried inside as the phone continued to ring. Quickly dropping her armful of groceries on the kitchen counter, she ran to the nearest extension and picked up the receiver.
“Is Mr. Eric Hilton there?” asked the voice on the other end of the phone.
“No, he’s not,” answered the woman. “This is his wife, Pat.”
“Would you be Nicky Hilton’s sister-in-law, then?”
“Yes,” she answered, her panicky feeling rising. “Yes, I am. Is he okay? Is Nicky okay?”
“I’m sorry to tell you that your brother-in-law is in the hospital,” said the caller. She identified herself as a head nurse in the emergency ward of Palm Springs General Hospital in Palm Springs, California, where the Hiltons owned a family vacation home. “Do you have a way of getting in touch with your husband?”
Pat, who was in the Houston home she shared with Eric, explained that her husband was in Dallas on business. She could reach him, of course. “But what happened?” she first wanted to know.
This was the phone call Pat Hilton had been dreading. By this time, Eric had been promoted to southwest sales manager of the Hilton Corporation, a job that entailed a great deal of travel between the home office in California and hotels in the Southwest. On his frequent visits to Los Angeles, he would spend as much time with Nicky as possible. So he and Pat were well aware of Nicky’s deteriorating condition.
The Hiltons: The True Story of an American Dynasty Page 33